Note: This is a full Taste Test review, with a star rating based on multiple visits.

I’ve never been to a roadside jerk stand in Jamaica. But I’ve been to a roadside jerk stand on the West Side of San Antonio.

That’s real, and that’s enough. Enough for two stars in a rating system that recognizes the transformative power of food, not just the package it comes in.

The Jerk Shack doesn’t look like much. Just a walk-up window with tilted patio awnings and picnic tables on either side. But when the food kicks in, none of that matters, whether it’s the Jamaican jerk chicken burning away the frustrations of a sweltering wait in line or an iron pan of shrimp and grits generating its own steam power.

The force behind this powerful food is Lattoia Massey, a Culinary Institute of America - San Antonio graduate operating under the nom de guerre Chef Nicola Blaque. Working with her husband, Cornelius Massey, and fellow CIA alum Chris White, Blaque opened The Jerk Shack in May.

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The Jerk Shack may not seem like much, but you'll feel like you're really in Jamaica when you stop there for jerk chicken or more expressive Jamaican dishes.

The pork’s roasted and pulled, and the chicken’s grilled and chopped. “Jerk” is the common denominator. It’s not just a sauce, more like a philosophy, a concept applied liberally as an adjective and verb the same way “barbecue” works in the States.

As a noun, the jerk was hot enough to curl your eyelashes, a sauce animated by thyme and cloves and garlic and citrus, but mostly by the high-Scoville blast of habanero. Blaque said she uses habanero rather than jerk’s usual scotch bonnet pepper because habanero is easier to get in these parts.

For me, habanero’s a pepper too hot for its own good, sacrificing flavor for fire. But suspended in a sweet velveteen sauce that found every fissure of charred skin and juicy meat, the habanero was suddenly bright, bold and nuanced.

I could begin and end my time here with jerk chicken and jerk pork. On its own, in a taco with pineapple relish or on a sandwich with slaw and Texas toast. But I’d miss out on something just as good: braised oxtails.

You’ve seen the star-shaped oxtail bones in other Southern preparations, surrounded by concentric halos of fibery beef and sticky fat. The Jerk Shack cuts back the fat, and the lean meat absorbed a tangy mahogany sauce that rippled with tomato, herbs and heat. Served with unfussy sides of cabbage and a mix of rice and peas, it formed Jerk Shack’s most balanced plate.

There’s nothing balanced about curried goat, nor would I want there to be. Goat’s a rebellious meat, thin and rangy and prone to contrary fits of tough and tender. This golden curry spiked with ginger and scallions didn’t try to tame that goat. It just harmonized with it.

There’s a thing called coco bread. Kind of a dry, thumpy, bun-size yeast loaf with a toasty crust. Then there’s the Jamaican patty, like a savory hand-pie filled with beef and mild gravy, the crust all flaky and glowing yellow from turmeric.

They’re a symbiotic unit. The beef patty’s highest calling is to fold inside the coco bread like a carbohydrate turducken. Heed the call.

A Jamaican jerk stand knows fried chicken wings and macaroni and cheese are part of the universal language. The Shack adds jerk spice to the lexicon for wings that fluently blended spice and crunch. Three of them draped along an iron pan of thick macaroni and cheese offered bar-food satisfaction in the sober light of midday.

With two cooking-school grads in the kitchen, not even the cramped space of a former West Side taco shop could stop shrimp and grits. Full-contact shrimp, with legs and feelers and eyes and insides, stood sentinel over grits with a grain as fat as puffed rice. Corn relish and jerk sauce lit the fuse for one of the city’s hottest takes on a dish that seldom gets the respect — or the shrimp — it deserves.

All that’s scaled back from a menu that once included salt fish fritters, fried spring rolls, even a whole fried snapper. Blaque said those might come back as part of a Sunday fish-fry when the Masseys finalize their plans for brunch.

Food doesn’t tell the whole Jerk Shack story. The shop has seized its own corner of the San Antonio zeitgeist, on Facebook especially. One video has generated more than 2 million views, and every post spawns long contrails of comments about the food, the newspaper it’s served on, the long waits in line and the inevitable sellouts.

The food’s the easy part. The newspaper? Just food-service wax paper printed to look like a front page. But there’s no easy answer to the laws of supply and demand.

My own Jerk Shack waiting experience ranged from 10 to 45 minutes. I had to walk away once, when half the menu was already gone and it took seven minutes for them to take a single order in a line 15 people deep.

The Jerk Shack’s ongoing response is sympathetic but unrepentant. “Caribbean food with a Caribbean wait.”

Mike Sutter is the restaurant critic and a food writer for the Express-News. Before joining the Taste team in 2016, he was a restaurant critic, editor and designer at the Austin American-Statesman and editor of the website FedManWalking.com. He’s been a guest on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Radio, the Cooking Channel’s “Eat Street” and KUT’s “Field and Feast.” His work has appeared on BonAppetit.com and in The Guardian. He’s won national awards for criticism and design from the Society for Features Journalism, the National Headliner Awards and the Society for News Design. Among the things he’s expensed for work: A Ouija board, a live chicken and plastic army men.